I don’t know why but an experience I had some time ago has been on my mind a lot lately… like in an OCD sort of frequency. I have sleep apnea and sometimes it gets very bad. I don’t know why I have it other than it seems to run in my family. I don’t have a CPAP because you have to undergo a sleep test to get one and I don’t even have a quarter of the money those costs. Anyway, one night it got really bad, probably the worst it had ever been or has been since. It actually woke me up. I was trying to inhale but couldn’t and by the time I had woke up my oxygen level must have been pretty low because there was excruciating pain in my head and chest. I was beginning to panic because this was worse than any time before

I haven’t been posting as much as I should lately. One only has to read over the last few posts to understand, at least somewhat, what has been going on in my life. Anyway, I’ve decided to post about something I have a passion for and have been doing for over a decade now. Genealogy. I’m fascinated with family history. Especially the lines I can trace very, very far back into the distant past. My oldest son just recently received his results from one of those companies that does DNA heritage testing. Very interesting results. Some I didn’t expect and others that didn’t surprise me at all since they matched up well with what I had already found during my own research. But he got both his mom’s and my DNA, so I’d like to do one of those tests for myself but I don’t want to pay the money

Man, I’m really struggling here… I’ve got a million things on my mind and want to write about them all but every time I begin to type today I see what I’ve written and realize that it probably won’t make any sense at all to readers so I delete and start over. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve deleted and restarted on this post today. It’s extremely difficult to try to convey anything at all in a coherent manner when there are so many disparate topics running through my mind seemingly simultaneously. Religion, sleep, dreams, goals, loneliness: all of these things are on my mind today and I want to write about them all but I don’t want to bore you to tears or end up typing out a saga instead of a blog post. I’ll start with two at the same time since they are related anyway…
Sleep

Odin. Lilith. Satan. Set. Now those are some gods I like! I don’t mean Satan or Lilith particularly in their maligned portrayals in the Hebrew and Christian myths. I mean the way that they all stand for knowledge, freedom, rebellion against all forms of tyrannical authority, and unbridled freedom.
Odin is cunning and relentless in his pursuit of knowledge, even sacrificing one of his eyes (and even himself at one time) for knowledge and power. He has mastery over things that scare the hell out of humans. He is called “Allfather” for good reason.
Satan is a gold standard for individuality, rebellion against anything that tries to assert authority over him, and a giver of knowledge. Even in the Jewish and Christian myths, it is Satan, not Yahweh, who gives knowledge to humans via that “magical” tree and its fruit. In that myth Yahweh wants to keep the humans ignorant by